Speech signals and audios signal have different characteristics. Therefore, speech codecs for the speech signals and audio codecs for the audio signals have been independently researched using unique characteristics of speech signals and audio signals, and standard codecs have been developed for each of the speech codecs and the audio codecs.
Currently, as a communication service and a broadcasting service are integrated or converged, there is a need to integrally process a speech signal and an audio signal having various types of characteristics, using a single codec. However, existing speech codecs or audio codecs may not provide a performance demanded of a unified codec. Specifically, an audio codec having the best performance may not provide a satisfactory performance with respect to a speech signal, and a speech codec having the best performance may not provide a satisfactory performance with respect to an audio signal. Therefore, the existing codecs are not used for the unified speech/audio codec.
Accordingly, there is a need for a technology that may select a corresponding module according to a characteristic of an input signal to optimally encode and decode a corresponding signal.